Everyone’s an engineer now: Inside v0’s mission to create 100 million builders | Guillermo Rauch

(calm music) One of our users yesterday submitted feedback. They were saying, "V0 is like a super genius, five-year-old PhD with ADHD." I'm not gonna oversell this as like, it knows everything about everything, but it has this sparks of brilliance.

How do you think things are gonna change for product managers, for product teams?

People could be more full stack. Imagine a designer that can ship a fully baked product, a product manager that can prototype and ship to production. We shouldn't put limits on ourselves and what we can build, and what we can ship, and what we can dream about making possible in these web services.

A lot of people are wondering, "What happens to engineers?" Should I learn how to code?

A lot of the programming jobs to be done that used to be specializations, I think are going away, in a way. They're translation tasks, but knowing how things work under the hood is gonna be very important for you, because you're gonna be able to influence the model and make it follow your intention a lot better.

We hear this word taste all the time. In terms of building taste, people are always like, "How the hell do I do that?"

Taste, sometimes, I think we think of as, like, this inaccessible thing that, "Oh, that person was born with taste." I see it as a skill that you can develop. I think it's extremely important to try lots of products. We have one of our sort of internal operating principles as increasing exposure hours. Try to quantify how much time you expose yourself to watching how people use your products. And you'll develop that muscle.

Wh- where do you think the biggest change is gonna happen?

We need to stop talking about AI at some point. I just see a future where AI becomes synonymous with software. We build software and we use software to build software.

Today, my guest is Guillermo Rauch. Guillermo is the founder and CEO of Vercel, which amongst other things, makes a product called V0, which has become one of the most popular AI website building tools in the world. He's also a legendary engineer and contributor to open source. He's created some of those popular JavaScript frameworks in the world, like Next.js and Socket.IO. He's both a builder and is building a product that's gonna change the way we all build products in the future. This episode is incredible. If you wanna really understand how product development is gonna change with the rise of AI and what skills you should be focusing on right now, I highly recommend you keep listening. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. Also, if you become a yearly subscriber of my newsletter, you get a year free of Linear, Notion, Superhuman, Perplexity Pro, and Granola. Check it out at lemmysnewsletter.com. With that, I bring you Guillermo Rauch. This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're building a SaaS app, at some point, your customers will start asking for enterprise features, like SAML authentication and SCIM provisioning. That's where WorkOS comes in, making it fast and painless to add enterprise features to your app. Their APIs are easy to understand so that you can ship quickly and get back to building other features. Today, hundreds of companies are already powered by WorkOS, including ones you probably know, like Vercel, Webflow, and Loom. WorkOS also recently acquired Warrant, the fine-grained authorization service. Warrant's product is based on a groundbreaking authorization system called Zanzibar, which was originally designed for Google to power Google Docs and YouTube. This enables fast authorization checks at enormous scale while maintaining a flexible model that can be adapted to even the most complex use cases. If you're currently looking to build role-based access control or other enterprise features like single sign-on, SCIM, or user management, you should consider WorkOS. It's a drop-in replacement for Auth0 and supports up to one million monthly active users for free. Check it out at workos.com to learn more. That's workos.com. This episode is brought to you by Vanta. When it comes to ensuring your company has top-notch security practices, things get complicated fast. Now, you can assess risk, secure the trust of your customers, and automate compliance for SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, and more with a single platform, Vanta. Vanta's market-leading trust management platform helps you continuously monitor compliance alongside reporting and tracking risks. Plus, you can save hours by completing security questionnaires with Vanta AI. Join thousands of global companies that use Vanta to automate evidence collection, unify risk management, and streamline security reviews. Get $1,000 off Vanta when you go to vanta.com/lenny. That's V-A-N-T-A.com/lenny. Guillermo, thank you so much for being here, and welcome to the podcast.